Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCl) is a type of virtual computing platform that converges compute, networking, virtualization, and storage into a single software-defined architecture. For instance, a single software application can interact with each component of hardware and software as well as an underlying operating system. Hyper-converged infrastructures provide enterprises and other organizations with modular and expandable compute, storage, and network resources as well as system backup and recovery. In a hyper-converged infrastructure, compute, storage, and network resources are brought together using preconfigured and integrated hardware.
A management application can manage another physical or virtual machine through a network-based communication protocol. One example of such a protocol is secure shell (SSH), which is a protocol that can employ public-private key technology to secure communications between two SSH clients within an SSH session. A risk exists for man in the middle attack where an attacker can intercept communications during the initialization or key exchange phase of an SSH session.